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A flood of AI deepfakes challenges the financial sector, with over 70% of new enrolments to some firms being fake

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Financial institutions are championing the use of artificial intelligence, arguing the new technology can rapidly accelerate tasks like “know-your-customer” checks, customer onboarding, and document processing. 

Advancements like these can drive customer acquisition and boost employee productivity, all good for the bottom line. “AI has been a game-changer in how we provide international payment and financial services. In 2024, we processed more than $1 trillion in global transactions, all supported by AI,” says Tianyi Zhang, a general manager of risk management and cybersecurity at Singapore-based Ant International.

Yet while AI presents an opportunity for financial firms like Ant International, it also poses risks. Bad actors can exploit AI advancements to intensify the threat of scams and fraud against both clients and financial institutions. 

Zhang, in particular, is worried about deepfakes, “perhaps the most well-known examples of AI-generated risks.”

“In some markets, we have found that more than 70% of new enrolments may be deepfake attempts,” he notes. “We’ve identified more than 150 types of deepfake attacks.”

Last year, Microsoft warned that AI-generated deepfakes are now highly realistic and increasingly simple for anyone to produce. The company flagged that deepfakes were now increasingly being used in fraud, and called for new legislation to curb bad actors from using these technologies. 

Deepfakes can be a challenge for financial institutions like Ant International, which need trusted identities to be able to carry out know-your-customer checks to comply with anti-fraud and anti-money laundering legislation.

For example, cybersecurity experts say that North Korean IT workers use deepfaked identities to get jobs at leading tech firms and funnel earnings back to the isolated country. 

‘Enhanced security’

Ant International is the international wing of Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba and operator of the ubiquitous Alipay payments app. In 2024, Ant Group set up Ant International as an independent business unit with its own board. 

Ant International operates Alipay+, Antom, Bettr, and WorldFirst, and is present in more than 60 markets globally. The company facilitates services like payments, cross-border transactions, and lending.

Zhang said AI helps Ant International deliver “greater efficiency” and “enhanced security” to its 100 million merchant customers worldwide, most of which are small and medium enterprises.

To combat new threats from AI, Ant International is focusing on three areas: investing in security and AI, building expertise and fintech-specific knowledge banks, and expanding its business-to-business AI products. 

Zhang points to Alipay+’s GenAI Cockpit Platform, which gives fintech firms, banks and superapps real-time risk assessment, among other services. Ant International claims the platform combats hallucinations and other data risks by using over 100 recognition models and 600,000 risk lexicons.

Ant International is also gearing up to launch EasySafePay 360, an account protection program for Alipay+, in the coming months. This platform will leverage AI to manage risk and safeguard transactions, as well as offer a money-back guarantee for transactions deemed to be unauthorized.

The company hopes the platform will facilitate the growing number of cross-border payments, spurred by global travel. Ant International, citing external research, estimates that the gross cross-border travel services market could reach $1.8 trillion by 2028.  



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U.S. trade chief says China has complied with terms of trade deals

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Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said China has been complying with the terms of the bilateral trade agreements and that the US is constantly monitoring commitments made by China in a bid to maintain a stable trade relationship.

“With China, it’s always we verify and we monitor and we watch the commitments. The commitments are quite specific,” Greer said Sunday on Fox News’ The Sunday Briefing. “So all of these things that we’ve agreed to with the Chinese recently are very concrete, we can monitor them with some ease, and so far, we’re seeing that they’re in compliance.”

Greer said China has gotten approximately “a third” of the way through its soybean purchase commitment for this growing season.

Bloomberg previously reported that after a series of orders placed in late October — the first of this season — China’s purchases of American soybeans appeared to have stalled. 

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in late October agreed to extend a tariff truce, roll back export controls and reduce other trade barriers. But some elements of the deal — including the soybean purchases, sale of social media app TikTok and an increase in licenses to export critical rare earths from China — remain in progress.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Greer held a video call with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on Friday, according to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, during which the officials had an “in-depth and constructive” discussion in which they vowed to keep stable ties and address “respective concerns” on trade and the economy, the outlet said.

Read More: Top US, Chinese Officials Pledge Cooperation on Trade Deal

Bessent on Sunday told CBS News’ Face the Nation that China will not speed up purchases, but they are still expected to take place this crop season and said soybean prices are up 12% to 15% since the agreement with China. He also said he divested from a soybean farm to comply with an ethics agreement

The Trump administration is expected to release its long-awaited farm aid plan this week, US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a cabinet meeting last Tuesday.

Asked whether chipmakers like Nvidia should give China advanced chips or if doing so would pose a security risk to the US, Greer expressed a need for the US to be cautious.

“My own view is we need to be very cautious about this,” Greer said on Fox News. “We want companies’ bottom lines to do well, but as policymakers, we need to make sure that the national security is placed first and foremost, and that’s why you’ve heard President Trump talk about the types of chips that maybe would be restricted and there’s always an open discussion on where that threshold lies, and it changes over time.”



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HP’s chief commercial officer predicts the future will include AI PCs that don’t use the cloud

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Increased focus on “privacy and security” may open the door for AI-enabled devices rather than rely entirely on cloud computing and remote data centers. 

“In a world where sovereign data retention matters, people want to know that if they input data to a model, the model won’t train on their data,” David McQuarrie, HP’s chief commercial officer, told Fortune in October. Using an AI locally provides that reassurance.

HP, like many of its devicemaking peers, is exploring the use of AI PCs, or devices that can use AI locally as opposed to in the cloud. “Longer term, it will be impossible not to buy an AI PC, simply because there’s so much power in them,” he said. 

More broadly, smaller companies might be served just as well by a smaller model running locally than a larger model running in the cloud. “A company, a small business, or an individual has significant amounts of data that need not be put in the cloud,” he said. 

Asian governments have often had stricter rules on data sovereignty. China, in particular, has significantly tightened its regulations on where Chinese user data can be stored. South Korea is another example of an Asian country that treats some locally sourced data as too sensitive to be housed overseas. 

Governments the world over, and particularly in Asia, are also investing in local sovereign AI capabilities, trying to avoid relying entirely on systems and platforms housed wholly overseas. South Korea, for example, is partnering with local tech companies like search giant Naver to build its own AI systems. Singapore is investing in projects like the Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION), which are better tailored to Southeast Asian countries. 

Asian AI adoption

Asia is HP’s smallest region, but also its fastest-growing. Revenue from Asia-Pacific and Japan grew by 7% over the company’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended in October, to hit $13.3 billion. That’s around a quarter of HP’s total revenue of $55.3 billion. (HP’s other two regions are the Americas; and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.)

McQuarrie also suggested that there was an opportunity to be “disruptive” in Asia. While many business leaders have been eager to embrace AI, at least rhetorically, actual adoption is proving more difficult. A recent survey from McKinsey reports that two-thirds of companies are still in the experimentation phase of AI. 

But McQuarrie believed that AI adoption in Asia could be “just as quick, if not quicker,” than other regions. 

Asia seems to be more comfortable with the use of AI, at least when it comes to users. An October survey from Pew found that fewer people in countries like India, South Korea and Japan reported feeling “more concerned than excited” about AI compared to the U.S. 

When it comes to convincing more companies to adopt AI, let alone AI PCs, McQuarrie said the answer was to make AI functions as seamless as possible, so “that it doesn’t really matter whether you understand that you’re embracing AI or not.”

“What we’re doubling down on is the future of work,” McQuarrie said. “The future of work is a device that makes your experience better and your productivity greater.”

“The fact that we’re using AI in the background? They don’t need to know that.”



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Trump administration waives part of a Biden-era fine against Southwest Air for canceled flights

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The U.S. Department of Transportation is waiving part of a fine assessed against Southwest Airlines after the company canceled thousands of flights during a winter storm in 2022.

Under a 2023 settlement reached by the Biden administration, Southwest agreed to a $140 million civil penalty. The government said at the time that the penalty was the largest it had ever imposed on an airline for violating consumer protection laws.

Most of the money went toward compensation for travelers. But Southwest agreed to pay $35 million to the U.S. Treasury. Southwest made a $12 million payment in 2024 and a second $12 million payment earlier this year. But the Transportation Department issued an order Friday waiving the final $11 million payment, which was due Jan. 31, 2026.

The department said Southwest should get credit for significantly improving its on-time performance and investing in network operations.

“DOT believes that this approach is in the public interest as it incentivizes airlines to invest in improving their operations and resiliency, which benefits consumers directly,” the department said in a statement. “This credit structure allows for the benefits of the airline’s investment to be realized by the public, rather than resulting in a government monetary penalty.”

The fine stemmed from a winter storm in December 2022 that paralyzed Southwest’s operations in Denver and Chicago and then snowballed when a crew-rescheduling system couldn’t keep up with the chaos. Ultimately the airline canceled 17,000 flights and stranded more than 2 million travelers.

The Biden administration determined that Southwest had violated the law by failing to help customers who were stranded in airports and hotels, leaving many of them to scramble for other flights. Many who called the airline’s overwhelmed customer service center got busy signals or were stuck on hold for hours.

Even before the settlement, the nation’s fourth-biggest airline by revenue said the meltdown cost it more than $1.1 billion in refunds and reimbursements, extra costs and lost ticket sales over several months.



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